Gut Yontiff, everyone and G’mar hatimh
tovah—We have now officially entered the tenth day of these Ten Days of
Repentance. Let’s make sure we observe this day fully and pray to be sealed
into the Book of Health, Prosperity, Fulfillment and Peace.
One day, parents of a 13-year-old boy, mindful of the
affluent suburb in which they were raising their son, wanted him too understand
how grateful he should be for the riches and luxuries that he so often took for
granted. And in order to drive this point home, they decided to take him on a
trip to the countryside, where he could witness farm life, or at least people
whose lifestyle and circumstances were markedly different and less
sophisticated than their own. So the family took this trip, stayed in the
countryside for a few days, and did their best to expose the young man to how
“the others” lived. The boy was deeply impressed and on the way back, the
parents asked him what he had learned from the excursion. The boy reflected on
the family vacation and admitted that he found the whole thing eye-opening. He
noted as follows: our family has a swimming pool, but the farm family had a
river flowing near their property; our family has these outdoor electrical
lights, but the farm family looks at the night time stars brighter than he has
ever seen in his life; our family goes to the store to buy food, but the farm
family just grows their own; our family has a dog, but the farm family has four
dogs; our family is on property surrounded by a high fence, but the farm family
seems to have fields that go on forever. The parents were a little taken aback
by their son’s responses and finally asked him—Well what do you make of all
this? Whereupon their son concluded, “I
never knew how poor we were.”
The last time I looked at the Declaration of
Independence, that august document asserted that our Creator has endowed us
with certain unalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. I think we’re doing okay in the life department because
after all, here we are and thank God we all look pretty much alive. As far as
liberty goes, we still live in a country defined by a generous set of civil
liberties and a court system to which we have recourse when we feel those
liberties violated. But when it comes to happiness, we don’t seem to be doing
as well. The United Nations, in its World happiness Report, found the United
States to hold position number 18, well below Australia in position number 10,
and Canada in position number 7, and 17 below the happiest nation in the world:
Finland. It would seem to me that in a nation that feels good about itself, we
would rate happier on the happy scale. But we didn’t. A survey by the American
College Health Association also found 52% of college students feeling hopeless
while another 39% have suffered from a depression that made it impossible for
them to work effectively. That’s a lot of unhappiness. If we are all supposed
to be pursuing happiness, I would say that our Happiness GPS system is
malfunctioning.
We can all probably come up with reasons for our
unhappiness. We certainly live in a bruising and fractious atmosphere of
political combat, which judging from everyone I speak to, makes us anxious. We
listen to media outlets that strike us as hopelessly bias, and with all the
charges of fake news and skewed reporting, many of us don’t know whom to
believe, and in some cases, what to believe. Some people are very upset by the
1%, that is, that percentage of the population that seem to be making wildly
more money than anyone else, perhaps because that’s true. And some of us are
unhappy because there is a sense that we are living in a kind of end-time, in
which the melting ice caps and burning rain forests point to a depletion of
earth’s resources that this precious little blue planet of ours simply cannot
sustain for long. Our days, or perhaps the days of our children on this earth,
are numbered. If that doesn’t make you unhappy, I don’t know what would.
One of the most popular courses at Yale University is
taught by Professor Laurie Santos. It’s PSYC 157: Psychology and the Good Life.
It essentially a course on the psychology of happiness, a course which draws on
scientific research that has focused on what it is that makes people
happy. A lot of the research stems from
the influence of Dr. Martin Seligman who was the founder of a strain of
psychology known as positive psychology or the psychology of wellbeing. Because
so much psychology of the past has dealt with people exhibiting a variety of
mental illnesses or imbalances, Seligman’s idea was to find well-adjusted
people, happy people, study them, and thus develop a whole school of psychology
focused on mental wellbeing.
How is your mental health these days? Are you happy?
And if you are happy, what is it that has made you happy?
When you wake up in the morning, is it a new day or is
it another day. How you view that day may determine whether you are an optimist
or a pessimist. The difference is important because as you may have already
guessed, optimists are happier. You almost have to be by definition. What makes
optimists happy are at least three different criteria:
1.
Optimists believe they are in control so events do not happen to
them, rather they make things happen. When you feel yourself in control, you
will almost always feel happier.
2.
Optimists are forward-looking, that is, they relegate the past to
the past and see the neutrality of the present moment as an opportunity to make
something good happen.
3.
Optimists tend to see the possibilities whereas the pessimist
tends to see the problems. Because the optimist is confident that changes can
be made, every problem presents the possibility of change. It is the ability to
see opportunity in crisis that make optimists happy
In the famous last chapter
of the Book of Proverbs, we read about the Eishet Hayil,
the Woman of Valor, who is our earliest example of a woman who has it all—a
husband, a family, a business, and prestige within the community. Her many
attributes are enumerated—her market transactions, her late hours, her wisdom,
and her industry—and among them is this one: Vatishak l’yom aharon
(Proverbs 31:25b), “…she looks to the future cheerfully.” How many of
us look to the future cheerfully? The Woman of Valor was also a woman of
happiness.
John Kralik was an attorney in LA and at the age of 53,
he found himself in a particularly disheartening position. He was on his second
divorce, alienated from his two kids, financially stressed out, unable to give
his employees a Christmas bonus, he didn’t feel good about his weight, and on
top of everything else, he was just feeling miserable. One day, on a hike, he
decided that something had to change and in response to that yearning, he
decided that he would write one thank you note each day to someone for whom he
ought feel a sense of gratitude. And so he set about this task that culminated
in a book entitled, “365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude
Changed My Life.” Right now, you may think that you don’t have 365 thank yous
to give, and if you think that, you’re right, because I estimate that just
about everyone has 10,000 thank yous to give. The fact of the matter is that
grateful people tend to be happy people. They forever see what they have as a
blessing of sorts, and this even among those people who are not necessarily
religious.
What is it about hakarat hatov,
acknowledging the good in life, that makes us happy. I think the issue has to
do with a human evolutionary adaptation to the environment, in which
identifying danger or problems register foremost in our brains. We can
understand this easier if you think about the media and what sells. What sells?
Bad news. Everyone is interested in bad news. We are almost predisposed to a
fascination with bad news, probably because it serves as a warning to do
whatever we need to do in order to protect ourselves. Good news? It doesn’t
sell! Good news requires no action or response on our part but a mass shooting,
a terrorist attack, a vicious hurricane, wildfires, etc. that will get our
attention. That then is why gratitude makes us happier because all the other
stuff that we are biologically and psychologically drawn to is not making us
happier. It also suggests that we are biologically drawn to a distorted
perception of the world because by ignoring or paying short shrift to the good,
we read out of the world the good that actually is. We distort the reality of
our lives. It is only by saying thank you that we actually correct the
distortion and literally get a grip on reality.
The story is told of a young man in his thirties who
goes off to one of these male bonding weekends where the whole issue of men
getting in touch with their feelings is discussed. On the agenda are all the
people that have done good for us whom we have never properly thanked. The
conference comes to a close and the young man returns home, having made a
promise to thank his father whom he believes he has never properly thanked. He
gets his father on the phone and his father says, “Oh, nice to hear from you
son, l’ll get your mother.” The young man says “No, Dad, I want to talk to
you.” There is a pause in the conversation and his father replies, “Are you in
trouble?” The son says “No, Dad.” The father says, “You need money?” The son
says, “No, Dad—I just want to say thank you for being such a great father and
supporting me these many years and always being there when I needed you.” There
s another pause in the conversation, and the father asks, “Have you been
drinking?”
The point is that if you think about those times when
someone has actually taken time out and thanked you, it may have taken you by
surprise but it probably also made you feel really good. Think about how many
people you could make happy by virtue of a simple expression of gratitude. We
are all veritable happiness making machines.
How often after one of these terrible mass shootings do
we hear neighbors talk about the alleged shooter in terms like these—He was so
quiet. He kept to himself. He never bothered anyone. And, of course, the shock
value in all this is the combination of an irrational act of terror from
someone who otherwise has seemed so overwhelmingly polite or, in the very
least, innocuous. But what people may be describing, perhaps unknowingly, are
individuals who are socially isolated, who don’t belong or fit into traditional
communities that would otherwise reign in the wayward thinking and anger of its
members.
In Christian faith communities, you have people talking
about the true meaning of Christianity and it is a tool for dealing with
people’s anger. So yes—you may in fact hate your neighbor, but wait—Is that very
Christian of you? Maybe you have to rethink that hatred of your neighbor. And
in Judaism, there was always a concept of mipnei darkei shalom, meaning
“for purposes of peace.” Yes, we know that you are averse to participating in
certain affairs of the wider community, but you know what—you’re going to
participate anyway mipnei darkei shalom, for purposes of peace,
and remember, Jewish people are big proponents of peace. I don’t mean to
suggest that either faith community offers
a foolproof structure for tempering the passions of their constituent
hot heads, but they do have such mechanisms in place that can respond to people
with such proclivities, hopefully before someone does something foolish and or
tragic.
When people grow alienated from that tradition, what
will serve as the energy to counter their baser inclinations? Remember we live
in an age where religion is viewed with suspicion, some of that attitude
justified given the bad behavior of clergy, and we also live in an age where
the emphasis on individualism condones the life choices of loners. I’m going to
make a couple of generalizations now—always dangerous—but I think they are
justified as a broad sweeping observation, with notable exceptions.
1.
It’s hard to be happy alone;
2.
Joy is an emotion almost always shared with someone else;
It is no accident that
when the Torah commands us to be joyous over a festival, as for example it does
with Sukkot (coming up in just a few days), it then adds that you must be
joyous “with your son and daughter (read that as your family), your male and
female slave (read that as your employees), the Levite (read that as the local
leadership), the stranger, the fatherless and the widow (read them as the
people whose life situations inhibit them from full participation in the
community). In other words, don’t let anyone play the loner. Everyone should
feel the joy because that’s how we experience joy. No one truly experiences joy
sitting in front of a computer screen.
Unless you’re talking to your grandchildren. Have I
told you about my grandchildren? Wait—this is important, and it has to do with
the role of the Internet in our lives. We are struggling as a modern liberal
society to determine the effects of the Internet on our lives and we will
probably not fully understand its impact for at least another couple
generations. On the one hand it is an incredible tool of staying in touch with
loved ones. Anyone who has used Face Time or Google Hangout or Zoom knows firsthand
the power of this technology. On the other hand, the way we consume
entertainment these days, or listen to lectures, from Netflix to Amazon Prime
to On Demand to Spotify, all these applications which have brought the world
into our kitchens, our dens, and our bedrooms, have also given us reason to
never leave home. Remember the old American Express ads which touted the
American Express credit car with the slogan, “Never leave home without it”? That
ad would no longer resonate in this new generation of technology. Now you have
few reasons to ever leave home because the purchase can be made from the
comfort of your home. Does that keep us connected or is it isolating us
socially from one another. And if we grow increasingly socially isolated from
one another, can we ever be happy?
There is a Conservative Movement teshuvah, a rabbinic
answer to an interesting question about whether one can create a minyan
on-line. In other words, let’s say we decided, next year, instead of coming to
shul for Kol Nidre, everyone stayed at home and tuned into the Zoom Room Kol
Nidrei service, and we get 1200 people in the same cyberspace room. Would that make
for a legitimate minyan? My initial response to that questions was—What a great
idea! Maybe not for Kol Nidre but during the week—why schlep out to the
synagogue for an evening service? Stay at home, log onto the Zoom Room, we get
ten people and a minyan we have made. The rabbis rejected the idea. They said
there is no such thing as a minyan in Cyberspace. A minyan must take place in
real space. In real space we can put a hand on someone’s shoulder, we can talk
to a person with our mouths and read their facial expressions, we can create
holy space by filling physical space with sacred and ancient sentiments—that’s
a minyan. We dare not think that community can be real, if the community isn’t
in real space. To be part of a community is to feel a sense of belonging, and a
sense of belonging creates happiness.
It turns out a lot of things we think would make us
happy don’t. Do you think that having a bigger house will make you happy?
Researchers have determined it doesn’t. What about having great grades in
school? No—that apparently doesn’t make students happy. What about being able
to take a long and luxurious vacation? No—that won’t make you happier. What
about making more money? Will that make you happy? Two Nobel Laureates in
Economics, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, studied 1000 American households
and did find a positive correlation between making more money and happiness,
but only up to about $75,000. After that, there seems to be little increase in
happiness as one’s income rises. That puts the price of happiness at about
$75,000—I’m going to say $78,000 because I want to adjust for inflation.
What about time? Do you think having more time would
make you happy? There is this relationship between time and money in so far as
some people believe that time is money. But that is just a platitude that
doesn’t hold up under analysis. A professor at the Harvard Business School,
Ashley Whillans, teamed up with Elizabeth Dunn, a professor at the University
of British Columbia, to study how people interact with money versus time. And
they discovered something very interesting. They found that if they were to
give someone $100, that person would likely spend it on a treat of sorts, some
unbudgeted item. On the other hand, given an extra hour, the person would use
it to complete some task, bills, yardwork, and so forth. It’s odd because
treated as commodities, money is very elastic—you can theoretically get more of
it by working an extra job. Were you to pay your bills with it, you would still
have some left over for a treat. Time, in contrast, is very inelastic. You only
have so much of it. But once people get a little extra of it, they use it for stuff
that they are already committed to doing. The odd thing is that when asked
about time, many Americans, especially parents, express a sense of
exasperation, of feeling rushed and pressured, of wishing they had more time to
spend with their family and friends. There is, on balance, far greater
satisfaction that comes with an abundance of time in contrast with what may
come from an abundance of money, yet given the extra time, people waste it on doing what they
already are slated to do. They don’t use their time for a treat. Isn’t it interesting that within Jewish
tradition, time is sanctified. The Festivals, Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur—all times when we are actually forbidden from doing the very work that
had we the extra time, we would definitely use to complete that work. And yet,
the tradition says, don’t use it in that way. The work gets done. The pay
checks will come. But once the time passes, there is no getting it back. It is
precisely because it is so finite in its nature—at least for a living human
being—that time becomes infinitely more precious than money. If we had more
time, we would be happier, provided we used it wisely.
There was a woman living in a poor, rural town, far
into the countryside, that the townspeople regarded as a surly, sour witch. Frankly,
the townspeople were not terribly nice either, so you can imagine just how
terrible the old woman must have been! She seemed always complaining, always
bitter, always spiteful. Most people avoided her. She was uniquely unlikeable. And
then, on her 80th birthday, she threw a party for the townspeople.
They weren’t sure what to make of it. Go to that party of that ungrateful,
resentful curmudgeon? Then again—it was a party—music, dancing, free food and
drink. They went and to their utter surprise, found a woman completely
changed—singing, laughing, playing the hostess with the mostess and making sure
that all the guests were well taken care of. It came time to cut the cake and she
called for a bit of order in the towns square. She was about to make a speech. She
welcomed the guests. She expressed the hope that they were having a good time. She
emphasized how much she wanted them to take a slice of cake and the party
favors she provided for all. And then she said—If I seem different to you this
day it is because I am. All my life I have been pursuing happiness and for
eighty years, I have failed to find it. And so, I have decided to stop pursuing
happiness, because I have discovered that happiness is not out there. Pursue
happiness and you will find only unhappiness, because true happiness is in here
(point to heart) and it is up to you to create it.
The townspeople were stunned and had never heard such
profound thoughts from anyone, no less from a woman they had so disliked. And
so the townspeople got their cake and their party favors, they walked back to
their cottages next to a beautiful river shimmering in the moonlight, gazed at
the stars shining brilliantly in the night sky above them, breathed in the rich
fragrance of the fields of grass stretching out beyond them for miles, and it suddenly
dawned on them all just how rich they really were, and that sense of wealth in
things intangible, made them happy.
There
is actually a very simple happiness test that you can take which will determine
whether you are happy or not. I had to think a bit before taking it because I
wasn’t sure if I wanted to know. Anyway, I took the test which is all of four
questions, and as it turns out, I am happy to report that I am happy. But I
think I already knew that. Anyway, on this most sacred day of the year, I want
to wish you all life, liberty, but not the pursuit of happiness, for that is a
sure path toward finding nothing more than unhappiness. Rather, I wish you the strength
and wisdom to create your own happiness, and that way, you will never have to
take a test to find out if you are or you aren’t.
Tzom
Kal—Have an Easy but also a Very Fulfilling Fast!
